I Felt It
by Thea-Zara
Summary: In the long night following the episode Currents (s03e07) Stiles watches Derek quietly, until Derek tells him what he felt. Spoilers through to Currents.


"I felt it." Came a quiet rough voice.

In the silence of the room, of the whole night really, it startled the Hell out of Stiles. Derek had gone fairly catatonic and Stiles sat watch while the others dealt with Boyd's remains.

Stiles had been slowly working his way through as many lists of memorized facts as he could to keep his mind off of the whole situation. It was something he'd learned to do in the long days and weeks following his mother's death to counter the raging thoughts that just wouldn't shut up. The thoughts he could feel creeping up again that would push him into a panic attack. He had gone through the basic things hours ago; his times tables, the periodic table, mathematical and scientific formulas, Hell he'd even mentally listed the wolf facts they'd managed to put together from the odds and ends of Peter's laptop and the Argent's bestiary.

Needless to say, he was quite deep in his mind by the time Derek spoke up and it startled the shit out of him... while he was balancing on two legs of a chair and trying to remember and list all the effects of Aconitum napellus in dried form when used in a poultice.

After a moment or three of arm waving to avoid the unavoidable crash, another moment of embarrassed leaping to his feet and cursing, and the time it took him to pick up the chair and resume sitting, he turned to Derek and said, as eloquently as ever, "Huh?"

Derek wasn't looking at him, or anything really, when he repeated himself. "I felt it."

"You _felt_ what, exactly?" Stiles asked cautiously, looking around for a tell tale tremble that would prove his theory that werewolves could sense and predict earthquakes, but saw and felt nothing out of the ordinary, except the soft words from the Alpha.

"I felt Boyd die. I felt his power." The lack of any real inflection was adding to the creepiness of the whole situation for Stiles.

"You were his Alpha. Wouldn't you expect to feel the loss of a pack mate?" He asked, carefully. "I mean I know Erica was inside that vault. The stuff it was made out of may have muted it somehow, but you were right next to him, so you know..." Stiles trailed off and couldn't think of anything so much in that moment as just how badly he wanted to smack himself for bringing up two things neither of them needed to discuss, ever.

"The fire practically caused me to go into shock, feeling them all die one after another after another, and I felt Laura die, even as a Beta, from halfway across the country, I just didn't want to admit it to myself. I felt _something_ when we killed Peter, and only part of it was the boost from taking the Alpha power. That's not what I meant though. They didn't just make me kill Boyd to hurt me. I mean yeah it was _meant_ to hurt, but it was also what Deucalion has wanted all along. That's how you join the Alpha pack."

"What's how?" Stiles leaned forward and asked, knowing he didn't really want to know this answer.

"Each of them killed their own packs. _He_ wanted to make me kill one of you, because after I felt the power, I'd kill the rest of you to feel it again and again, to feel stronger, to have more power."

"Shit, he doesn't know you at all, does he?" Stiles scoffed, before settling back in the chair again.

Derek stopped staring into space and _looked_ at Stiles. "What do you mean?"

"If you actually thought Scott could succeed at keeping Peter in line, and survive this whole Alpha Pack crap, you'd hand him your little Alpha sash, and be completely cool with it."

Derek gaped at him a minute or two. "What makes you say that?"

"Please. You wanted a pack and yeah for a month or three you went a little power happy, and let's not forget power stupid, what with turning Jackson of all people, but you got over it quicker than any other unprepared Alpha I've read about, by months if not years. Most of the rampages the hunter's use as excuses to hunt wolves came from unprepared and out of control Alphas. And, despite the idiocy of your first convert, you picked three strong candidates. You gave them the choice and you tried to make them a family. That's not the actions of a power junky who's going to slaughter his way through the pack for what? A power boost and a quick high?"

"What if I am?" He asked, his eyes more frightened than Stiles had ever seen them, even during the whole wolfsbane bullet incident.

"Right." Stiles said with an inelegant snort of disdain. "We both know Derek Hale doesn't allow himself to have nice things. You have a martyr complex a mile wide, and a guilt complex that's at least double that. You might have finally decided on a place to live that doesn't have a condemned sign on it... yet," He glanced back at the pool of water taking up the bulk of the loft. "and I don't want to know what your new friendship with Ms. Blake entails, since I don't need to have that stuck in my head during school, thank you very much, but you, my wolfy friend are even now, blaming yourself for all sorts of things that are just not your fault. So the idea that you would stop punishing yourself long enough to enjoy some kind of Alpha murder high is laughable"

"How can you say that, I killed him, and Jennifer-"

"Ahhh. No more about Ms. Blake. You know my brain to mouth filter is broken and my mind works in keen and mysterious, but often embarrassing ways. So, let us not discuss my teacher in any manner that might make me say or do something inadvertently that will end with you feeling obliged to smack me off my steering wheel, Okay? And as for Boyd, cliché as it may be, 'Guns don't kill people, people kill people.' And you, Derek, were that proverbial gun. There is not one bit of doubt in my mind that if you had any choice in the matter, you would have died instead of hurting him, let alone killing him. Ergo, you did not kill Boyd any more than you choose to bite Allison's psycho grandpa, and don't think I didn't have words with Scott over that shit, either."

Derek was grimacing, probably at the memory of how Gerard tasted, and looked more than a little sceptical, but at least he was thinking about the possibility that every bad thing in the world wasn't his fault.

Stiles would count that as a win.

Notes: I'm not sure how good this turned out, but I had a lot of overflowing feels after watching Currents and this just came out. I have a few other short reaction pieces to the recent episodes, which I might post if I can polish them into something readable and post them as their own series.


End file.
